listen to the video ’the growth of world population’. make rough notes and pay special att

The growth of cell-phone users in the U.S. has tapered off from the breakneck pace of 50% annually in the late 1990s to what analysts project will be a 15% to 20% rise in 2002, and no more than that in 2003. To some extent, numerous surveys have found, slower growth in demand reflects consumer disillusionment with just about every aspect of cell-phone service—its reliability, quality, and notorious customer service.

The cooling off in demand threatens to cascade through the industry: The big four U.S. cell-phone carders—Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, Sprint imperil their timetables for becoming profitable, not to mention their efforts to whittle down their mountains of debt. As the carders have begun to cut costs, wireless- equipment makers—companies such as Lucent, Nokia, and Ericsson—have been left with a market that's bound to be smaller than they had anticipated. Handset makers have been insulated so far, but they, too, face a nagging uncertainty. They'll soon introduce advanced phones to the U.S. market that will run on the new networks the carders are starting up over the next year or two. But the question then will be: Will Americans embrace these snazzy data features—and their higher costs—with the wild enthusiasm that Europeans and Asians have?

Long before the outcome in clear, the industry will have to adopt a new mind-set. "In the old days, it was all about connectivity." says Andrew Cole, an analyst with wireless consultancy Adventis. Build the network, and customers will come. From now on, the stakes will be higher. The new mantra: Please customers, or you may not survive.

To work their way out of this box, the carders are spending huge sums to address the problem. Much of Sprint PCS's $ 3.4 billion in capital outlays this year will be for new stations. And in fact, the new high-speed, high-capacity nationwide networks due to roll out later this year should help ease the calling-capacity crunch that has caused many consumer complaints. In the meantime, some companies are using better training and organization to keep customers happy.

The nation's largest rural operator, Alltel (AT), recently reorganized its call centers so that a customer's query goes to the first operator who's available anywhere in the country, instead of the first one available in the customer's home area. That should cut waiting time to one minute from three to five minutes previously.

What is the text mainly about?

A．The bad service in the U.S. cell-phone industry.

B．The crisis in the U.S. cell-phone industry.

C．The conflicts among cell-phone companies in the U.S.

D．The price of the U.S. cell-phone industry.

SECTION 1 (10 points)

Listen to the following passages and then decide whether the statements below are true or false. There are 10 questions in this section, with 1 points each. You will hear the recording only ONCE. At the end of the recording, you will have 2 minutes to finish this section.

听力原文： My mother was a classic homemaker. When I think of her in those days, I see a woman in perpetual motion, making the beds, washing the dishes and putting dinner on the table precisely at six o'clock. I came home from school for lunch every day. While we ate, Mom and I listened to radio programs. My mother also found lots of what people now call "quality time" for my brothers and me. She didn't learn to drive until the early 1960s, so we walked everywhere. In the winter, she bundled us up on a sled and pulled us to the store. Then we held and balanced the groceries for the trip home. In the middle of hanging the wash on a clothesline in the backyard, she might help me practice my pitching or lie down on the grass with me to describe the cloud shapes overhead. One summer, she helped me create a fantasy world in a large cardboard box. We used mirrors for lakes and twigs for trees, and I made up fairy-tale stories for my dolls to act out. Another summer, she encouraged my younger brother Tony to pursue his dream of digging a hole all the way to China. She started reading to him about China and every day he spent time digging a hole next to our house. Occasionally, he found a chopstick or fortune cookie my mother had hidden there.

My mother was a typical housewife, who cared for her family.

A．正确

B．错误

Cigarette Makers See Future (It's in Asia)

—By Philip Shenon

New York Times Service

The Marlboro Man has found greener pastures.

The cigarette-hawking (兜售香烟的) cowboy may be under siege back home in the United States from lawmakers and health advocates determined to put him out of business, but half a world away, in Asia, he is prospering, his craggy (毛糙的) all-American mug slapped up on billboards and flickering across television screens.

And Marlboro cigarettes have never been more popular on the continent that is home to 60 percent of the world's population.

For the world's cigarette-makers, Asia is the future. And it is probably their savior.

Industry critics who hope that the multinational tobacco companies are headed for extinction owe themselves a stroll down the tobacco-scented streets of almost any city in Asia.

Almost everywhere here the air is thick with the swirling gray haze of cigarette smoke, the evidence of a booming Asian growth market that promises vast profits for the tobacco industry and a death toll measured in the tens of millions.

At lunchtime in Seoul, throngs of fashionably dressed young Korean women gather in a fast-food restaurant to enjoy a last cigarette before returning to work, a scene that draws distressed stares from older Koreans who re member a time when it would have been scandalous for women from respectable homes to smoke.

In Hong Kong, China, shoppers flock into the Salem Attitudes boutique (时装商店), picking from among the racks of trendy sports clothes stamped with the logo of Salem cigarettes.

In Phnom Penh(金边), the war-shattered capital of Cambodia, visitors leaving an audience with King Sihanouk are greeted with a giant billboard planted right across the street from his ornate (装饰华丽的) gold-roofed pal ace. It advertises Lucky Strikes.

According to tobacco industry projections cited by the World Health Organization, the Asian cigarette market should grow by more than a third during the 1990s, with much of the bounty going to multinational tobacco giants eager for an alternative to the shrinking market in the United States.

American cigarette sales are expected to decline by about 15 percent by the end of the decade, a reflection of the move to ban public smoking in most of the United States. Sales in Western Europe and other industrialized countries are also expected to drop.

But no matter how bad the news is in the West, the tobacco companies can find comfort in Asia and throughout the Third World, markets so huge and so promising that they make the once all-important American market seem insignificant. Beyond Asia, cigarette consumption is also expected to grow in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and in the nations of the former Soviet Union.

Status appears to matter far more than taste. "There is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that smokers can taste any difference between the more

expensive foreign brands and the indigenous (本地产的) cigarettes," said Simon Chapman, a specialist in community medicine at the University of Sydney. "The difference appears to be in the packaging, the advertising."

He said that researchers had been unable to determine whether the foreign tobacco companies had adjusted the levels of tar, nicotine and other chemicals for cigarettes sold in the Asian market. "The tobacco industry fights tooth and nail to keep consumer

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

Most people have experienced the feeling, after a taxing mental work-out, that they cannot be bothered to make any more decisions. If they are forced to, they may do so intuitively, rather than by reasoning. Such apathy is of ten put down to tiredness; but a study published recently in Psychological Science suggests there may be more to it than that. Whether reason or intuition is used may depend simply on the decision-maker's blood-sugar level—which is, itself, affected by the process of reasoning.

E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University discovered this by doing some experiments on that most popular of laboratory animals, the impoverished undergraduate. They asked 121 psychology students who had volunteered for the experiment to watch a silent video of a woman being interviewed that had random words appearing in bold black letters every ten seconds along the perimeter of the video. This was the part of the experiment intended to be mentally taxing. Half of the students were told to focus on the woman, to try to understand what she was saying, and to ignore the words along the perimeter. The other half were given no instructions. Those that had to focus were exerting considerable serf-control not to look at the random words.

When the video was over, haft of each group was given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it and half was given a glass of lemonade with sugar substitute. Twelve minutes later, when the glucose from the lemonade with sugar in it had had time to enter the students' blood, the researchers administered a decision-making task that was designed to determine if the participant was using intuition or reason to make up his mind.

The students were asked to think about where they wanted to live in the coming year and given three accommodation options that varied both in size and distance from the university campus. Two of the options were good, but in different ways: one was far from the campus, but very large; the other was close to campus, but smaller. The third option was a decoy, similar to ope of the good options, but obviously not quite as good. ff it was close to campus and small, it was not quite as close as the good close option and slightly smaller, if it was far from campus and large, it was slightly smaller than the good large option and slightly farther away.

Psychologists have known for a long time that having a decoy option in a decision-making task draws people to choose a reasonable option that is similar to the decoy. Dr. Masicampo and Dr. Baumeister suspected that students who had been asked to work hard during the video and then been given a drink without any sugar in it would be more likely to rely on intuition when making this decision than those from the other three groups. And that is what happened; 64% of them were swayed by the decoy. Those who had either not had to exert mental energy during the showing of the video or had been given glucose in their lemonade, used mason in their decision-making task and were less likely to be swayed by the decoy.

It is not clear why intuition is independent of glucose. It could be that humans inherited a default nervous system from other mammals that was similar to intuition, and that could make snap decisions about whether to fight or flee regardless of how much glucose was in the body.

Whatever the reason, the upshot seems to be that thinking is, indeed, hard work. And important decisions should not be made on an empty stomach.

The word "taxing" in the fast paragraph means

A．tiring.

B．imposing taxation.

C．paying taxation.

D．relaxing.

Every year 100 million holiday-makers are drawn to the Mediterranean. With one third of the world's tourist trade, it is the most popular of all the holiday destinations: it is also the most polluted.

It has only 1 percent of the world's sea surface, but carries more than half the oil and tar floating on the waters. Thousands of factories pour their poison into the Mediterranean, and almost every city, town and village on the coast sluices its sewage, untreated, into the sea.

The result is that the Mediterranean, which nurtured so many civilizations, is gravely ill-the first of the seas to fall victim to the abilities and attitudes that evolved around it. And the population does not merely stifle the life of the sea-it threatens the people who inhabit and visit its shores.

Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery, polio, viral hepatitis and food poisoning are endemic in the area, and there are periodic outbreaks of cholera.

The mournful litany of disease is caused by sewage. Eight-five percent of the waste from the Mediterranean's 120 coastal cities is pushed out into the waters where their people and visitors bathe and fish. What is more, most cities just drop it in straight off the beach; rare indeed are the places like Cannes and Tel Aviv which pipe it even half a mile offshore.

Less than 100, 000 of Greece's four million coastal people have their sewage properly treated-and Greece, is one of the cleaner countries of the northern shore.

The worst parts of the sea are Israeli/Lebanon coast and between Barcelona and Genoa, which flushes out over 200 tons of sewage each year for every mile of its length.

Not surprisingly, vast areas of the shallows are awash with bacteria and it doesn't take long for these to reach people. Professor William Brumfit of the Royal Free Hospital once calculated that anyone who goes for a swim in the Mediterranean has a one in seven chance of getting some sort of disease. Other scientists say this is an overestimate; but almost all of them agree that bathers are at risk.

An even greater danger lurks in the seductive seafood dishes that add so much interest to holiday menu. Shellfish are prime carriers of many of the most vicious diseases of the area. They often grow amid pollution. And even if they don't they are frequently infected by the popular practice of "freshening them up" throwing filthy water over them in markets.

Industry adds its own poisons. Factories cluster round the coastline, and even the most modern rarely has proper waste-treatment plant. They do as much damage to the sea as sewage. Fifteen thousand factories foul the Italian Lihurian Riviera. Sixty thousand pollute the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia, Sicily and the west Italian coast! The lagoon of Venice alone receives the effluents of 76 factories.

Thousands of tons of pesticides are blown off the fields into the sea, detergents from millions of sinks kill fish, and fertilizers, flushed out to sea, nourish explosions of plankton which cover bathers with itchy slime.

Then there is the oil—130,000 tons pouring each year from ships, 115,000 tons more from industries round the shore. Recent studies show that the Mediterranean is four times as polluted as the north Atlantic, 20 times as bad as the north-east Pacific.

Apart from the nine-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is landlocked, virtually unable to cleanse itself. It takes 80 years for the water to be renewed, through the narrow, shallow straits, far too slow a process to cope with the remorseless rush of pollution.

According to the passage, the Mediterranean______.

A．accounts for one-third of the world's tourist population

B．is the most polluted area on earth

C．has only 1 percent of the world's surface

D．is the most polluted sea in the world